An enterprise network is both local and wide area in scope. Typically, it integrates all the systems within an organization, whether they are Personal Computers, UNIX workstations, minicomputers, or mainframes. In fact in an enterprise network all systems can potentially communicate with all other systems in the network while maintaining reasonable performance, security, and reliability.
Such interoperability has been achieved mainly with Internet protocols and Web technologies that generally provide better results at lower costs and fewer configuration problems than enterprise computing models would predict. The Transport Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP), more commonly referred to as TCP/IP, have been the unifying internetworking protocols that have allowed enterprises and organizations to interconnect workgroup and divisional Local Area Networks (LANs), and provide connection with the Internet. Web protocols, such as Hypertext Mark Language (HTML), Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and Extensible Markup Language (XML), for example, have similarly unified user interfaces, applications, and data formatting, providing organizations a common framework upon which to construct intranets (e.g., internal internets). A Web browser is akin to a universal client, and Web servers can provide data to any of those clients. Web servers are typically distributed throughout the enterprise, following distributed computing models. Multi-tiered architectures can generally be employed, wherein Web clients access Web servers, and Web servers access back-end data sources, such as mainframes and/or server farms that can include databases, and authentication services, for example, all of which can be essential to the smooth functioning of the enterprise network in its totality. Failure of one server and/or service can have a catastrophic chain reaction knock on effect causing other dependent servers and/or services to become similarly inoperable. For instance, the failure of an authentication server/service can be the causal nexus for the failure of a multitude of related web services. Such concomitant relationships between server and/or services can typically be referred to as a service dependency, expeditious identification of which can be crucial to the smooth and continuous operation of enterprise networks.